News

The Digital Futures team is a step closer to achieving its ambitions to develop a user-friendly system for publishing and exploring enhanced digital qualitative data online.

The project team have started putting the QuDEx metadata schema into production for qualitative data collections available through the UK Data Service.

QuDEx enables powerful description of qualitative data and more complex social science collections. It is being used alongside the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI), which describes data collections at the study level. The Digital Futures project is also utilising the Text Encoding Initiative XML standard for marking up XML transcripts. This metadata work is still developmental but progressing very well.

This is just the latest development from the project team. On 21 June 2013 the project's metadata standards were presented in a webinar to European data archives who are interested in QuDEx and the DDI. Full details on other project activities are available on the project page.

The Digital Futures project is funded by the ESRC and encompasses two strands of work which cover requirements gathering, system design, implementation and testing, preparation of enhanced qualitative data to populate the system, and user outputs making use of linked scholars. It is set to finish in March 2014.